Understanding Targeted Email Marketing with Your Niche Sites

Niche—Adjective. Meaning: Denoting or relating to products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population. A niche site should absolutely be doing targeted email marketing. And this is why…

Let’s take a closer look at targeting email marketing which can be used very effectively in building smaller niche sites. These can allow you to build some streams of income while you work on a blog, or build some other business.

UNDERSTANDING TARGETED EMAIL MARKETING

This Is Trouble is a broad blog.

Just a few of the things I talk about include: girls, travel, dating abroad, travel hacking, how to make money online, niche sites, how to self-publish, how to sell…etc. You get the point. There are a lot of topics.

Reader A might have zero interest in the same things Reader B has here.

That’s okay, but it’s a general blog that sells my own products, and I like that. It gives me the ultimate freedom, in many ways.

It also means many people come to this site and never buy a thing. Or they never return. That’s because whatever “it” is that they’re looking for—it’s not here. Someone could simply search for “Spanish women” and end up here—and guess what—I sell nothing about dating in Spain.

So they either subscribe (and my email list for Trouble certainly isn’t an example of targeted email marketing) and become a longer-term reader, or they click away and they’re lost forever in the internet black hole.

It’s a very poor business model until you have the traffic numbers to sustain whatever it is you’re trying to sustain.

In my case, it’s my life in Eastern Europe.

Now that we’re clear on that, you can draw the reasonable conclusion that page views to converted sales on This Is Trouble is quite low. And that would be an accurate assumption that you can make for many larger scale blogs with a large, but quite broad, audience.

ENTER UKRAINE LIVING

The title gives it all away: UkraineLiving.com is about…you guessed it—Ukraine.

This is niche by the very definition that I gave above. This means that people who end up on this site are searching for something very specific. They want more information about Ukrainian women, Ukrainian traditions, how to learn Russian, or maybe some specific information about a city like Kiev or Odessa.

That’s it.

Reader A and Reader B who both end up on Ukraine Living are both very interested in something about Ukraine.

There is no general or broad audience. This naturally means that the specific page views of Ukraine Living are much lower than this site (and always will be), but that people are more engaged. They are more likely to find what they want.

The real lesson? All traffic is NOT the same.

Do not make this mistake.

THE EASY SALES

Around Valentine’s Day, I sent an email to my Ukraine Living list.

I was letting them know that one of my Russian language lessons of choice, Rocket Russian, was on sale. They had about two days left on the sale, and 50 or so copies available.

(It’s actually on sale again now, and it really is an excellent program if you’d like to pursue learning Russian. Click here to learn more).

Normal price was $59 instead of $150.

Now, how many people do YOU think are on my small little Ukraine Living email list?

37, TO BE PRECISE.

Out of those 37 people, three went and bought a copy of Russian Rocket that day. That’s a prime example of targeted email marketing. Those people want Ukraine information.

3 out of 37 is a crazy-high conversion rate. If I could convert at that percentage on my Trouble products, I’d be a millionaire. I took home $22+ on each of those, and all I did was write an email out in 5 minutes and drop a link in.

If you want to do the “math” on that…

$66 for 5 minutes * 12 (for a full hour) = $792 an hour.

To put things in perspective, a hell of a lot more than 37 of you are going to read this–but I’m not going to convert my Troublesome Solutions offerings at 10% from this post.

And if I do, expect to see pictures of me popping numerous bottles this upcoming weekend 🙂

CLOSING THOUGHTS

The point is, targeting email marketing for a list who you know is already interested can have huge potential payoffs, even if it’s “smaller peanuts”. Somebody subscribed to that list on Ukraine Living because they have a huge interest in traveling to Ukraine. It’s natural they would have an interest in learning some of the language.

Stay tuned in the coming days, as I plan to share that entire email with you and give some more insights into targeted email marketing.

Copy it for your own small sites, if you wish.

Let me know if you have thoughts or questions in the comments below,

-Kyle

PS: You can get on that Ukraine Living list to see some more examples by clicking here.